


Irresistible Force

by Sky_kiss



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Character Study, Emet is a sad boy, Emet should probably get some therapy, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Mostly Canon Compliant, Reincarnation, Unnamed Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Who deals with his problems terribly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-26 12:36:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21374269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sky_kiss/pseuds/Sky_kiss
Summary: “They are weak, my dear, and they seek a yoke to labor under. Be that Vauthry’s, or yours, or our dear Exarch’s. Man is unchanging.”She stared at him and, for a moment, he felt purelyseen. Eons and a sundering had not changed the stubborn bent of her mind. She shook her head and said, “You’re wrong.”Or: an unstoppable force and immovable object will never coexist.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 6
Kudos: 64





	Irresistible Force

**Author's Note:**

> Whoops. Here I am. In Rat Husband hell.

Names held meaning. Names were precious. 

Emet-Selch was not his name, though he had worn it for so many eons and had it bandied about so _liberally_ that it may as well have been. Twas a title, nothing more, and he could claim no great attachment it. There was no thrill of affectation when it tripped from a companion's tongue. There was…

...well, nothing at all. 

Hades, that was _his_ name and it was a precious thing. True names were guarded zealously and shared only amongst the truest of companions. Less than a dozen of his compatriots had really known him and among them...well, only one had _mattered_. Callous as it seemed; cruel as it seemed. 

He pursed his lips to a still thinner line. His touch strayed to his wrist, first massaging the skin and then tugging his sleeve back into place. Twas an inexplicable thing, really. Millenia removed and he could still call some touches so easily to the fore. Not the ones a mortal might have imagined, no. Nothing so tawdry as a tryst. Only the little things. The things which had weight. 

The feeling of their fingers, hers more slender even than his own, twining together. The gentle scrape of her nails as she brushed the hair away from his forehead. Or the curl of her fingers over his wrist. 

Little things, silly in the grand scheme of the universe and more precious for it. Emet closed his eyes. The same images were always awaiting him. Visions of Amarout, of friends he’d never forgotten, and her. The black robes of their kin had always suited her so ill, hanging off a figure best described as willowy. His mate had always been scented with summer and life, a counterpart to his oft proclaimed ‘broodiness.’ Greens had suited her better. Greens and gold and reds. Vibrant colors. 

The ghost smiled. A millenia had blurred her features, aye. He could no longer recall the exact shade of her skin or the fall of her hair...and thus his simulacrum was imperfect. But he recalled that which mattered most, and that was the gentle tenor of her voice. The way it caressed his name, his true name, when she spoke. “Hades.” 

Something clenched in his chest. Half in his heart and half in his belly, as if someone had scrambled his organs. After so many years, centuries, aeons, on his own he was well familiar with the sensation. Twas homesickness, plain and simple. 

He allowed himself one final, lingering, look before pushing his ghosts away. T’would serve him ill to dwell.  
______

He had wandered the cosmos for what seemed an eternity. 

Oh, true, there was company if he was truly desperate. Elidibus was tolerable for brief spells. Lahabrea...well, only as a last resort. Emet kept his own council the vast majority of the time. In the beginning, he had met the sundered world with some tentative curiosity. 

Emet-Selch walked among them. He sought to understand, to guide and to shape. He took lovers. He sired heirs. He raised empires and set them back to dust only to raise another. In the midst of their quest for rejoining, he sought some measure of...purpose, he supposed was the word. 

But it was fleeting. Everything in this sundered world was _fleeting_ and imperfect and wretched. He saw the reflections of those he’d once knew in these mortal souls. They stared back at him in stupid wonderment. Not one recognized him for what he was or what they had been. 

In the beginning, he hated them. But hate was a violent emotion and such things were better suited to Lahabrea and his endless passions. Emet was different. Emet was tired. So hate cooled to indifference, and then to malaise, and then to nihilism. 

He raised his empires, yes, but he saw little point in their governance. Man needed no guidance towards destruction. Twas already his nature. 

And so the architect slept and dreamt of better days. Days when the world had meaning. Days spent beside a maid who had spoken his name so sweetly.  
____

Tired as he was, he could not deny a sort of delicious irony in his maid’s recurrence. 

A champion of Light. Of Hydaelyn herself, though her supposed _mother_ had precious little to do with her strength. That was innate. That was her and no amount of sundering would change that very real truth. He stared at her, wonderment and something dangerously akin to hope rising like bile in his throat. She would turn to him, recognize him, truly _see_ him.

The muscles in her shoulders pulled taut, her posture squared. She met his gaze and held it. 

There was no understanding there. There was _nothing_ there. Only a dumb, mortal, shell housing a fragmented soul. 

He considered killing her. Admittedly, it would be in poor form. It’d been so long since he had any proper entertainment and the Scions _were_ entertaining. But that feeling swelled and choked him and the urge to wrap his hands around her throat and squeeze until the life left this shade’s eyes was undeniable.

Instead, he dropped into a low bow and introduced himself as a one Emet-Selch.  
____

The eyes were the same. 

He catalogued these little similarities when her attention was fixated elsewhere. The eyes and the temperament and that was where the similarities ended. The shade frowned at him, brow furrowing, as she reached up to tuck an errant strand of hair behind her ear. The color, he noted, was wrong. 

“Your silence is disconcerting, Ascian.” 

“Why, my dear? So fond of my voice already.” 

She huffed. “More apt to say I find it odd when you are not rhapsodizing about our mortal inadequacies.” 

“And you’ve figured me out so early. My, I have lost my touch.” And perhaps there was something in her smile. An echo, and only an echo, but even a scrap of bread could prove sufficient for the starving man. “Perhaps there is some hope for you yet. Tis a slim hope, I grant you, but a hope nonetheless.” 

The Warrior rolled her eyes, waving him off as if she’d done it a thousand times before. 

In another life, she had.  
____

Hate was such a melodramatic emotion. He had locked it away, deep in the recesses of his mind, largely for its impracticality. Hate blinded you. Hate brought one facet of the world into sharp focus while dulling everything else. 

For a moment, he hated this self styled Warrior of Darkness. 

Any new piece of the board would have been intolerable this late into the game but _she_ was a masterstroke. She was a hellish new addition to Hydalean tiresome troupe and she had brought chaos to their meticulously laid plans. He clenched his jaw, watching the bruised and battered citizens of the First flocked to her for succor. 

“You do them no great favor, coddling them so,” he said. The Warrior started, eyes widening briefly, before she managed to collect herself. She had contended with stranger things these past months than an Ascian manifesting in her private chambers. 

“Were you watching?” 

“How many times must I _say_ it, hero? _Eternally_. Mine eyes can see naught else.” He drummed gloves fingers again his chin. “Yours is peculiar breed of destruction; I take no small pleasure in marking its path.” 

Her brows pinched in that particular way as she crossed to the kitchenette. The Warrior placed one glass on the countertop, appeared to consider, and then added a second. She poured a generous portion of wine into each. “Those people require hope. I would not expect a conqueror to understand.” 

“And what, pray tell, do _you_ fancy yourself as? For surely Vauthry and the world at large would paint you as precisely that.” He hummed, ignoring the brush of their fingers as he took the wine from her. “A benevolent conqueror you may be, but a conqueror all the same.” 

She pursed her lips. “I do not rule them.” 

“No, you _lead_ them. By all means, continue to luxuriate in your semantics.” The bay windows looked out of the lakeland. The horizon held little beauty to him but he would admit a certain fondness for the night sky. “They are weak, my dear, and they seek a yoke to labor under. Be that Vauthry’s, or yours, or our dear Exarch’s. Man is...unchanging.” 

She stared at him and, for a moment, he felt purely _seen_. That feeling of deja vu settled in his chest. She shook her head and simply said, “You’re wrong.” No explanation; only two maddening words and a tone which brooked no room for argument.

“Oh?” 

“Yes.” She smiled at him. Sipped her wine but did not expand on her thoughts. 

Eons and a sundering had failed to change the stubborn bent of her mind. Emet sighed, drank deeply, and held up his glass in salute.  
_____

What a wretched world this had become. 

Oh, he held no particular fondness for any of them, mind you, but the abundance of light made the First particularly onerous. Emet drummed his fingers against his chin. The warden was near. He could not make out the exact particulars (well...he might have, were he to apply himself; he had no interest in _that_), only that it was close. 

It was more difficult to make out these days, suffused as the Warrior was with light. The poor creature must have been in agony but lo, noble to the last, she never let on. Dark bags rimmed her eyes. She sat awake, huddled between the roots of a massive tree. The girl, the...useless little copy, was curled against her side, head tucked in her lap. Exhausted as she was, Emet would have painted the Warrior’s expression as relieved. She took comfort in the distraction, idly stroking the child’s hair as she worked through her tumultuous thoughts.

“No rest for the righteous, hmm?” 

She glanced up at him, smile tired. “There you are. We were wondering when you’d make your appearance.” 

“Always when you least expect me, my dear. It lacks for drama otherwise.” She nodded. If he squinted, he could already make out small fissures in her already fractured soul. A little more light and she was bound to shatter. The Warrior winced, shifted, hand stilling in her charge's hair. Emet clucked his tongue. “Tell me, this collection of wayward children...has it come about by chance or design? You seem to have acquired a new stray before I’ve so much as turned my back.” 

The Warrior stared down at the girl (Minfilia, he believed it was; an imperfect copy of a copy). Her voice was quiet when she spoke, “She has nightmares. No one can blame her for that. I...wouldn’t have her suffer them alone.” 

“How _noble_ of you, Hero. And who attends you in the long stretches of the light?” 

“You, apparently.” 

Emet chuckled. “Clever girl. Clever _and_ foolish; tis a duality well suited to a hero.” 

She leaned her head back against the tree, eyes drifted shut. He wondered what might have drifted behind them; if her nightmares were similar to his own. Their world ending; friends dying around them. He doubted it. “Tell me a story, Ascian.” 

He snorted. “What right do you have to demand such a thing, my dear?” 

“None at all. But,” and she smirked. “Infatuated as you are with the sound of your voice...I do not think you will deny me.” The wretched little thing patted the stretch of earth beside her. “Please. I would hear of your Amaurot.”

And so he spun her tales of their city’s spires, of their people, of _their_ world.  
_____

“You could be a part of _this_ world.” 

She said it while smiling. A bruise was already beginning to blossom over the rise of her left cheek, dried blood crusting along her hairline. It was a reminder, much needed, that she was only an echo. A mortal echo of the woman he’d once loved. 

He had always stood on her left. It was a position he found himself resuming all too easily. The Ascian linked his hands at the small of his back, staring up at the sheer cliffs before them. “An imperfect reflection, dear. Barely a world at all.” 

“Perhaps. But it’s our world, Ascian. And we are quite fond of it.” 

“So I’ve gathered.” He sighed, tired. Eternally tired and eternally unable to _rest_. “And were I to extend the same offer, hero? Offer you a place in _my_ world?” 

She did not respond and that was an answer unto itself.  
_____

Darkness had returned. Soon, one way or another, this charade would end. 

For now, there was a brief stretch of quiet. Emet...Hades, looked out over the countryside. His maiden...her _shade_...stood stark still beside him. The light within her was blinding, seething angrily beneath her skin. The proximity burned. 

He would suffer it. At least for a few more moments. The Warrior reached out to him, threading fingers (hers more slender, still, even in this new body) through his. Her thumb found the curve of his wrist and traced it, more hesitant but no less familiar. Her voice was very quiet, as if she feared this temporary peace between them might shatter. 

“Are we to be enemies, Emet?” 

In all their long years, he had never lied to her. This would be the first time and the last, and with it all their doors and all their potential would finally come to a close. He smiled. The Ascian took the liberty to reach out, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. He touched her cheek, catalogued her expression. The Warrior’s brow furrowed, first in confusion and then in something almost akin to melancholy. She turned into the touch and he said: 

“My dear, we were never anything but.”


End file.
